This year, we got bold with our newish-to-us house and went for a major transformation of the front yard by replacing some of the lawn with a huge flowerbed. We considered taking out all the grass (which honestly, includes its fair share of weeds, clover, bermuda grass, and who-knows-what!) and making that half of the front yard like a botanical garden. In the end, we kept grass in the middle as a meandering lawn path, which then opens up to a larger area with three raised beds for veggies. That also allows this half of the front yard to blend better with the other half, which is still a lot of grass under a large maple tree.

Before

When we got started, I had intended to take some great “before” photos, but I got so eager to just get moving on the project that I didn’t. I regret that now. I have a shot here that shows a glimpse of what it looked like before — mostly grass, with a curved corner rose bed by the center walkway, a few large shrubs up against the house, a crape myrtle tree in the middle of the grass, and a rose hedge on the right side:

Drawing up a plan is really helpful

Our first year here, we made an oval flowerbed under the crape myrtle in the lawn, but that was about it. So, I drew up a plan and talked it over with Santia. We made some changes based on each other’s preferences and then plotted out which new plants would go where, showing the existing plants as well. We grew many of the flowers from seeds in our garage, and that helped us afford so many plants. This is what we envisioned, and we pretty much stuck with the plan. If you click the image, you can then magnify to see details if you’d like:

By the way, we started that drawing by just printing out a google satellite map of our house and tracing the outlines. Try that if you take on a project like this! Also, I love seeing veggie beds in front yards. I wrote a little about this in my post about creating the raised beds, including my anger at HOAs and local governments that try to prevent people from doing it.

Also notice that we made clusters of same plants. We try to follow a rule of thumb that each cluster should be an odd number, generally 3-7 plants. This come out way better than just randomly placing plants or doing polka-dot patterns with alternating plants. However, when a plant is a spreading groundcover or something that gets large and shrubby, the cluster isn’t usually important. For each cluster of zinnias on the map above, we planted 5-7 seedlings, keeping the varieties together in clumps, although each zinnia variety had multiple colors, and we couldn’t tell what color they were at planting time, since they hadn’t bloomed yet. It worked.

Dealing with existing grass

Anyway, we decided this was too big of an area to dig out the existing grass, so we tried an alternative: using a layer of cardboard underneath a berm we created with trucked-in topsoil and compost on top. Alas, I didn’t take photos of the cardboard phase either (I’ll do better next time, I promise!). I do have some photos of this in the raised bed post, and it worked somewhat the same, except we couldn’t lay the cardboard all the way to the edge of the new flowerbeds here, because the way the berm tapered down, it wouldn’t have enough soil on top of it to keep it from showing or to ensure it deteriorated over time.

After dealing with the cardboard and not being completely happy with the process, I decided to just dig out the sod in the area closer to the house, which we planted with ornamental grasses (see the third pic below).

We learned that bermuda grass is one tough plant, and we’re still pulling it out of the flowerbed now, six months later. It finds a way to grow up between the cardboard pieces, even when they overlap and they’re buried under a foot of topsoil. We think we’ll eventually kill it off by repeatedly pulling the shoots and denying those roots of photosynthesis. But we’ve been a bit busy this fall (One of our kids got married! Yeah!) so there’s more out there that needs pulling very soon!

Irrigation

I decided to try using the existing lawn sprinklers for irrigation, for a couple of reasons. I know it doesn’t sound “garden-politically-correct” but I kinda hate drip irrigation! It’s very difficult to do a large bed like this and get enough coverage with drip soaker hoses. There will be gaps between emitters where little seedlings won’t have enough water. And no matter how I try to cover it with mulch, the drip lines eventually get uncovered and look ugly. Also, it seems like the drip components start to get brittle and break or clog with hard water deposits, and some parts need to be replaced every year.

I did replace all the sprinkler heads with more efficient ones with the rotating streams of water. These require less flow (although you have to let them run longer because of that), and I have so many heads in that area that I needed to enhance already-weak coverage by getting some sprinklers that had longer throw distance. Here’s an example of the type I installed. They’ve been great! Along the sidewalk, I replaced all of the sprinkler bodies with longer risers so they can pop up higher to spray over the close plants. It’s working pretty well, but as always with sprinklers and large plants, there are dry zones where some of the plants block the water’s reach. I supplement with some hand watering, especially when it’s over 100 degrees in the summer.

And… here it is!

All right, enough talk, right? Here’s how it turned out!

Now, when we meet people in the neighborhood, they say, “Oh, you’re the ones with all the flowers!” We’re really enjoying what this has done for the beauty of our home. And hey, now we’re about to start the second phase and do the same thing on the other half of the front yard. That’s our upcoming fall project.

Finally, if you’d like to see a nice little 30-second walk-around, check this out: